Re: number of transactions doubling

On Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 02:51:24PM -0700, Sriram Dandapani wrote:
> I have a strange problem with the number of transactions generated
> within my application. I use jdbc batching to submit insert statements
> from a jboss app server to postgres 8.1.2.
>
> A batch can have from 100 to 3000 inserts.
>
> I noticed the following:
>
> When I run the following query
>
> select current_timestamp,datname,age(datfrozenxid) from pg_database;
>
> The age columns shows say 1,500,000,000
>
> When I run the same query after say 10 minutes, it shows 1,500,600,000
>
> I have issued about 40,000 inserts via jdbc batching in 10 minutes.
>
> It appears that the jdbc driver is generating twice the number of
> transactions as inserts. This behaviour appears consistent with the
> number of inserts that I generate

Uh... you're inserting 40k rows and getting 600k transactions... how are
you concluding that the jdbc driver is generating 80k transactions?

> The target table has triggers that route data to appropriate tables. The
> tables to which data is routed has check constraints that do further
> inserts. (All of this happens in 1 jdbc transaction)

Actually, no matter what JDBC is doing, all of that will happen within a
single transaction on the database (unless you're using something like
dblink from within the triggers). So even if you were issuing insert
statements with autocommit on, you'd see at most one transaction per
insert.

> I expect JDBC Batching to generate fewer transactions depending on
> batch size.
>
> The mystery is why am I seeing double the number of transactions being
> generated.
>
> This is causing transaction id wraparound limits to be approached
> quicker than I would like.

As for your autocommit bit-flipping, why don't you just issue either a
rollback or a commit when you release the connection?
--
Jim Nasby jim(at)nasby(dot)net
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com 512.569.9461 (cell)